Engineers Win Energy Department Grants to Help Develop a Reliable, Resilient Power Grid

AMES, Iowa – Two Iowa State University electrical engineers have won grants totaling $2.6 million to help the U.S. Department of Energy improve the country’s power grid.

The Energy Department’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability recently announced seven grants totaling nearly $10 million over three years for early stage research projects designed to help utilities more effectively add solar farms, wind turbines, combustion engines and energy storage systems to the grid – collectively known as distributed energy resources.

These resources “are becoming an increasingly important part of America’s energy mix, and improving sensing and monitoring and modeling will be critical to integrating them into the grid,” said Patricia Hoffman, the acting assistant secretary for the electricity delivery office.

Here’s more about the two projects led by Iowa State engineers (with final grant amounts subject to negotiation):

$1.4 million from the Energy Department (plus $350,000 in cost-share funding) to a project led by Zhaoyu Wang, an Iowa State assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Wang and other researchers will develop real-time monitoring and modeling of modern power grids, including renewable energy sources, using smart sensors and big-data techniques. The goal is better grid models for utility companies resulting in better system control, reliability and integration of renewable energy.

$1.2 million from the Energy Department (plus $300,000 in cost-share funding) to a project led by Venkataramana Ajjarapu, Iowa State’s David C. Nicholas Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Ajjarapu and his collaborators will address the challenges of adding high levels of intermittent and variable power sources to the grid, mainly wind and solar power. The project is designed to develop advanced grid models that address the reliability and control problems associated with variable energy sources and help utilities understand what kind of delivery guarantees they can make.

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Columbia investigators have made a major breakthrough in nanophotonics research, with their invention of a novel "home-built" cryogenic near-field optical microscope that has enabled them to directly image, for the first time, the propagation and dynamics of graphene plasmons at variable temperatures down to negative 250 degrees Celsius. If researchers can harness this nanolight, they will be able to improve sensing, subwavelength waveguiding, and optical transmission of signals.

A cross-campus collaboration led by Ulrich Wiesner, professor of engineering at Cornell University, has resulted in a novel energy storage device architecture that has the potential for lightning-quick charges for electronic devices.

Scientists added an imaging capability to Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials that could provide the optoelectronic information needed to improve the performance of devices for power generation, communications, data storage, and lighting.

An international team led by scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley discovered how to exploit defects in nanoscale and microscale diamonds and potentially enhance the sensitivity of magnetic resonance imaging and nuclear magnetic resonance systems while eliminating the need for their costly and bulky superconducting magnets.

The Precision Reactor Oscillation and Spectrum Experiment (PROSPECT) has completed installation of a novel antineutrino detector that will probe the possible existence of a new form of matter - sterile neutrinos.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory made the first observations of waves of atomic rearrangements, known as phasons, propagating supersonically through a vibrating crystal lattice--a discovery that may dramatically improve heat transport in insulators and enable new strategies for heat management in future electronics devices.

Jet fuel, pantyhose and plastic soda bottles are all products currently derived from petroleum. Sandia National Laboratories scientists have demonstrated a new technology based on bioengineered bacteria that makes it feasible to produce all three from renewable plant sources.

A piezoelectric ceramic foam supported by a flexible polymer support provides a 10-fold increase in the ability to harvest mechanical and thermal energy over standard piezo composites, according to Penn State researchers.

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The University of Utah College of Engineering has received a $2 million grant to create a laboratory and develop new technology for communities with backup power sources, known as microgrids, so they can quickly and more securely operate in the event of a massive power outage due to a natural disaster or cyberattack.

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced that the Department of Energy will award 219 grants totaling $34 million to 183 small businesses in 41 states. Funded through DOE's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, today's selections are for Phase I research and development.

Sandia National Laboratories will receive $10.5 million from the Department of Energy to research and design a cheaper and more efficient solar energy system.The work focuses on refining a specific type of utility-scale solar energy technology that uses mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight onto a receiver on a tower.

After completing an extensive evaluation of institutions of higher learning in the United States and Europe, Solar Turbines Incorporated has chosen Penn State as a university partner to establish a center of excellence in gas turbines. The center involves numerous faculty across Penn State's College of Engineering.

The American Nuclear Society has designated the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory an ANS Nuclear Historic Landmark, recognizing more than 50 years of isotope production and nuclear fuel cycle research.

Steven Cowley, a theoretical physicist and international authority on fusion energy, has been named director of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), effective July 1.

Scientists have used a powerful X-ray laser at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to heat water from room temperature to 100,000 degrees Celsius in less than a tenth of a picosecond, or millionth of a millionth of a second.

A collaboration between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Oregon Health & Science University has been chosen as a national center for a Nobel Prize-winning method of imaging, cryo-electron microscopy, that is revolutionizing structural biology.

The National Institutes of Health announced today that it will establish a national service and training center for cryogenic electron microscopy research at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.